As with the launch of any creative product— you sweat the details, hope for serendipity, send it out the door and wait for the reviews and ratings. The blogosphere reaction during this first week has been encouraging. FatMan Collective says it all, “Coke is also smart to create a widget that users should actually find useful, and not something that feels like advertising.” Yes, that was the entire point!!

These are exciting times for marketers wanting to get involved with social media. Virtually all the major social networks are opening up their platform with their own APIs or adopting open ‘standards’ like OpenSocial. This means more opportunities for marketers to develop meaningful, interactive, social applications to bring their brands to life.

It’s also exciting to see that when it comes to serving advertising to social network users, advertisers that are starting to get that they can’t just re-purpose their old banner ads – but need to engage their audience in meaningful ways.

We’re happy to announce that CokeTags, using Linkstorm’s PUP (Personal Universal Profile) technology, has gone live on Facebook today.

CokeTag is a Coca-Cola sponsored, customizable widget for individuals, bands, bloggers, artists, activists, - and others to showcase themselves and drive traffic to content they select. From a professional marketing point of view, it carries brand messaging into the Social Media space. While it launches on Facebook, we plan to expand the app into other social networks soon.

The current debate around behavioral targeting and online privacy is a healthy one, and as a consumer and a marketing executive I find myself on the fence arguing for both sides.

However, it’s easy to get blind sighted by the polemics of this debate, forcing us to believe that we’re at a fork in the road where our choices are either behavioral targeting or ‘traditional’ (contextual, demographic, intent, etc.).

There are other alternatives that serve both advertiser and the consumer interests and goals. That’s what I think is lost in the noise of this debate.

At Linkstorm we tried to come up with a clever tagline to associate our name with. Against my better judgment, I decided to solicit the diversity of talent and opinion across the organization in order to define who we are and what we do in a short punchy sentence.